plants and trees in Maya!

Hi everyone! I'm pretty new at Arch Viz and I'm having a horrible time finding(making) trees and plants. Converted paint fx can only get you so far and all of my research so far has only brought up stuff for max. Any tips?

Re: plants and trees in Maya!

Onyx can directly plug into 3DS Max with the "TreeStorm" plugin I believe but Onyx itself can export as .obj, so it's fine to use with Maya...except you cannot tweak your trees as fast as TreeStorm but I'd recommend Onyx over Maya's PaintFX anyday.

It's possible but a lot of hassle getting nice trees in PaintFX compared to almost a one click solution that you get with Onyx.

Re: plants and trees in Maya!

Interesting! good to know that its is an option. thanks for the fast reply. I am looking into what kind of tweaking I need to do with the paint fx stuff to make them look better. I have seen some people say converting them to geometry might help, although it might slow down renders. if you have any ideas I would love to hear them. I am just a poor freelancer just starting out so I probably won't invest in any fancy plugins for some time.

Re: plants and trees in Maya!

PaintFX is really a post process effect that is used with Maya Software renderer. When you convert PaintFX to geometry this enables other 3rd Party Renderers like mental ray and V-Ray to render PaintFX.

As for tips on making realistic foliage....it is hard and mostly requires a *lot* of tweaking but hopefully these tips from Duncan help:

Re: plants and trees in Maya!

Hi guys,
Maybe my suggestion is abit old-ish but using Sprites in maya to achieve the trees and foilage is the way to go..It does trick the camera but that is what 3D is for..to trick the audience or eye ...So my best bet would be PaintFX but if that doesnt work out for you then i would suggest Sprites..